‎The Rwanda Revenue Authority, the government body responsible for collecting domestic taxes and customs duties, announced on July 8 that it closed the 2025/26 fiscal year having collected Rwf 3,956.4 billion in tax revenue, surpassing its target of Rwf 3,795.4 billion and reaching 104.2 percent of its planned collection.

‎The figures, announced at a press briefing at RRA headquarters, represent a 27.7 percent increase over the previous fiscal year. Commissioner General Ronald Niwenshuti attributed the result to strong economic growth, tighter tax administration and rising voluntary compliance among taxpayers.‎‎

The announcement continues a run of consecutive over-performances at the tax authority, which closed the prior 2024/25 fiscal year at 101.3 percent of its target. This year’s overshoot is considerably larger, arriving as Rwanda’s national budget crossed Rwf 7 trillion for the first time and as the country’s economy expanded 11 percent in the first nine months of the fiscal year, well above the 8.1 percent growth rate that had been projected.

‎Commercial activity grew 23.7 percent over the period, and the share of goods and services subject to value-added tax rose from 52.3 percent to 59.2 percent, indicating a formalizing economy generating more taxable transactions than official projections had assumed.‎‎

For a country whose post-genocide reconstruction was heavily dependent on donor financing, sustained overperformance in domestic tax collection carries weight beyond the balance sheet. It reflects an economy converting more of its growth into taxable, formal activity, and a tax authority whose enforcement tools are increasingly effective at capturing it. ‎

Commissioner General Niwenshuti’s office registered 126,282 new taxpayers during the year, recovered Rwf 277.1 billion in outstanding tax arrears, and ran 1,542 anti-smuggling operations that generated an additional Rwf 29 billion. Fraud-detection systems also blocked what the authority estimated at Rwf 28 billion in illegal value-added tax refund claims.‎‎

The scale of this year’s overshoot raises the obvious question of how the government sets next year’s target, and whether the growth in formal economic activity behind these numbers is a durable structural shift or a peak tied to this year’s unusually strong expansion.

Either way, the Rwanda Revenue Authority enters the 2026/27 fiscal year negotiating from a position considerably stronger than the one it held twelve months ago.